Sunday, January 06, 2013

Those who note how few blacks are in the Republican Party and accuse Republicans of not conducting black voter outreach, fail to recognize two key facts. The Republican Party has never turned its back on blacks and, since the party was founded in 1854 as the anti-slavery party, Republican leaders have continued to take actions to help blacks.

In order to solve the problem of so few blacks in the Republican Party, the root cause of the problem must be understood.

Democrats first used brutality and discriminatory laws to stop blacks from voting for Republicans. From 1865 to about 1910, Democrats killed 3,000 Republicans, 2,000 of whom were black.

Now Democrats use deception and government handouts to keep blacks from voting for Republicans. As author Michael Scheuer wrote, the Democratic Party is the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

Democrats have been running black communities for the past 50+ years and the socialist policies of the Democrats have turned those communities into economic and social wastelands. The article “Groups Like NAACP, Urban League, CBC are Hypocrites” by Raynard Jackson exposes how blacks continue to vote for Democrats while, incredibly, blaming Republicans for the devastation created by Democrats.

In his book, “Dreams From My Father”, President Barack Obama described what he and other Democrats do to poor blacks as “plantation politics.” Blacks who leave the Democratic Party’s economic plantation and align with the Republican Party are denigrated as “sellouts”, “Uncle Toms”, “House Negroes”, or worse. An article which demonstrates just how racist Democrats are toward black Republicans is “'Tokenism' vs. 'Diversity' - The left's racially charged attack on Sen. Tim Scott” by James Taranto.

In his book, Rev. Perryman details the true history of civil rights that has been re-written by the Democrats who control our educational system. The book documents how Republicans fought to end slavery while Democrats fought to expand it. After the Civil War, Republicans amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867, designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks.

Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every piece of civil rights legislation from the 1860s to the early 1960s. Democrats enacted the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. After Democrats took control of Congress in 1892, they passed the Repeal Act of 1894 that overturned civil rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875. Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan in 1865that became the terrorist arm of the Democratic Party to lynch and terrorize Republicans—black and white.

It took Republicans nearly six decades to finally achieve passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s. Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools.

Little known today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Dirksen was instrumental to the passage of civil rights legislation in ‘57, ‘60, ‘64, ‘65 and ‘68. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing.

Behind closed doors, President Johnson made the following statements.

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now, we've got to do something about this; we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference." - President Lyndon B. Johnson

And no, the parties did not switch sides. The racist Democrats—that Republicans were fighting—died Democrats. It does not make sense to believe that, after Republicans spent over a century fighting for black civil rights and won, the racist Democrats rushed into the arms of the Republicans. It didn’t happen. In fact those racist Democrats declared that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than a Republican because the Republican Party was—and still is—the party for black civil rights. As one pundit wrote, the Republican Party is the party of the four F’s: faith, family, freedom and fairness.

Democrats condemn Republican President Richard Nixon for his so-called “Southern Strategy.” These same Democrats expressed no concern when the racially segregated South voted solidly for Democrats for over 100 years, while deriding Republicans because of the thirty-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party.

The "Southern Strategy” that began in the 1970’s was an effort by Nixon to get fair-minded people in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were discriminating against blacks. Georgia did not switch until 2004, and Louisiana was controlled by Democrats until the election of Republican Bobby Jindal, a person of color, as governor in 2007.

As the co-architect of Nixon's "Southern Strategy", Pat Buchanan provided a first-hand account of the origin and intent of that strategy in a 2002 article posted on the Internet. Buchanan wrote that Nixon declared that the Republican Party would be built on a foundation of states’ rights, human rights, small government and a strong national defense. Nixon said he would leave it to the Democratic Party to squeeze the last ounce of political juice out of the rotting fruit of racial injustice.

The key to increasing the participation of black Americans in the Republican Party is to counter the misinformation about the history of civil rights and hold the Democrats accountable for their racism—past and present.

Given the fact that Democrats have conditioned most black Americans to expect or depend on government largess to survive or improve their standard of living to some degree, most black Americans are not receptive to the Republican Party’s message of lower taxes, smaller government, self-reliance and personal responsibility.

Notably, based on my personal experiences, even when Republicans go into black communities and provide information and assistance with getting out of poverty, those Republicans are rejected and called racists. Below is a vignette about what happened when I attempted to help a black community in Florida.

A Vignette

Here in Florida where I live, after a white woman Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives achieved the designation of black communities in Florida as “Enterprise Zones,” she was attacked by Democrats, black and white, as a racist. After then Republican Governor Jeb Bush instituted a program called “Front Porch” to marshal resources from the Federal, state and local governments to help revitalize black communities, he was trashed by Democrats, black and white, as a racist.

This gross injustice motivated me to take a different approach in the impoverished black community located here in my city that is being run by Democrats and has been for the past 50 years.

I worked with a group of black Republicans -- and we proudly identified ourselves as Republicans -- to help our local black community get out of poverty, using the Enterprise Zone and Front Porch programs.

We held town hall meetings to explain our Republican values and principles to the residents. We raised $10,000 with the help of the white chairman of our local county Republican Party to develop an initial redevelopment plan needed for the neighborhood to qualify for designation as a “Front Porch” community.

We raised money for scholarships, as well as for food and clothing for the needy. We raised money to help with the building of a dining facility for the neighborhood charter school.

We also assisted with getting HUD to tear down the dilapidated public housing and replaced with modern town homes open to people of mixed-income. We worked with the city to establish a job training program so that the poor residents could get out of poverty and qualify for living in the new homes.

As a result of our efforts the city established a redevelopment office in the community and allocated over $200,000 that was used to develop a comprehensive revitalization plan for the entire neighborhood. The neighborhood was well on its way to becoming a prosperous community.

And the thanks we received from the black residents? None. We were fought every step of the way by the Democrats running that community who trashed us as “sellouts” and “Uncle Toms”. To add insult to injury, our local liberal newspaper that was owned by “The New York Times” published a story that gave credit for the improvements to the NAACP and did not even mention us black Republicans.

When the black woman who was a Democrat switched parties to help us and ran for re-election, she lost to her black Democrat opponent. He proceeded to immediately dismantle all of the good that we had done for that community. Now, years later, that community is back to being down in the dumps, the bad conditions worsened by President Obama’s socialist policies that have destroyed our nation’s economy and created high black unemployment.

If there are to be changes in the black community, black Americans must seize control over their own destiny and hold politicians accountable for the content of their policies, and not vote merely based on the label of their party.

Frances Rice is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel and Chairman of the National Black Republican Association. She may be contacted at: www.NBRA.info

About This Blog & the National Black Republican Association

Lieutenant Colonel Frances Rice, United States Army, Retired is a native of Atlanta, Georgia and retired from the Army in 1984 after 20 years of active service. She received a Bachelor of Science degree from Drury College in 1973, a Masters of Business Administration from Golden Gate University in 1976, and a Juris Doctorate degree from the University of California, Hastings College of Law in 1977.
In 2005, she became a co-founder and Chairman of the National Black Republican Association, an organization that is committed to returning African Americans to their Republican Party roots.
Please, no donations.
Email contact: NationalBlackRepublican@Gmail.com